In 2009, Great Bloomers were a young band on the rise. Their first album, Speak of Trouble, was gaining critical attention, they were asked to perform on MTV Live and they had a fan in folk-hero Gordon Lightfoot.
But once Great Bloomers began to hit their stride, singer-songwriter Lowell Sostomi’s band started to fall apart.
“When the band started it was just a group of friends—more or less,” he says. “But as the band picked up and we started touring, it sort of weeded out the people who didn’t want to do music with their lives.”
But during that time the band grew. Since their previous album the group has seen a complete 180, with Sostomi being the only original member from the Speak of Trouble days. For almost two years the band has toured relentlessly with acts like Yukon Blonde, Rural Alberta Advantage and The Wooden Sky, with whom they share the stage this week at The Seahorse.
With them comes a setlist of primarily new songs off their as-of-yet untitled LP, which hits shelves this fall.
Recorded at Toronto’s Lincoln County Social Club, the songs continue the band’s tradition of jumping stylistically throughout each track. Where with Speak of Trouble critics and fans saw glimmers of Wilco and The Minutemen in their roots tinged folk-rock, Sostomi says that no two songs sound the same on the new record.
Inspired by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Bill Callahan and Silver Jews, Sostomi says the new tracks are “dark and dirty” compared to the sunny carefree pop of Speak of Trouble and their 2011 EP, Small Town Love.
“With the first record it was sort of easy to draw the country-tinged comparison to us,” he says. “But I would say you’re probably not going to be able to do that at all on this record.”
The Wooden Sky w/Great Bloomers, Saturday, March 3 at The Seahorse, 1663 Argyle Street, 9pm, $13.99/$16.99
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2012.